Fans Have Dropped $77M On This Guy’s Buggy, Half-Built Game

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It sure doesn't seem like Wired is a fan of Star Citizen or its creator, Chris Roberts.

Star Citizen gets relatively little attention from the countless gaming-enthusiast websites that breathlessly report every tiny development on big mainstream titles. But Ten Ton Hammer, a site devoted to massively multiplayer online games, has been voicing some Emperor-has-no-clothes skepticism about Roberts' project. “Pushing imaginary ships that cost $2,500 when there isn't a shred of a game,” wrote critic Lewis Burnell, “feels like a con rather than an investment.”
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You mean the game that has generated millions of dollars in funding but seems to have more time spent on creating more expensive DLC than actually finishing the game itself seems kind of shady?

Nahhh. It's not as if anyone else who dragged it on for this long wouldn't have been called out ages ago.
 
Merc1138 said:
You mean the game that has generated millions of dollars in funding but seems to have more time spent on creating more expensive DLC than actually finishing the game itself seems kind of shady?

Nahhh. It's not as if anyone else who dragged it on for this long wouldn't have been called out ages ago.
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I'd rather it be done right than done quickly.
 
And yet every developer worth their salt who recognizes and comprehends the scope of the game Cloud Imperium is making will contend that they're making reasonably impressive progress.

People seem to think shit just materializes.
 
inbedwithhomer said:
And yet every developer worth their salt who recognizes and comprehends the scope of the game Cloud Imperium is making will contend that they're making reasonably impressive progress.

People seem to think shit just materializes.
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How long has the game been in development and how much of it is completed?
 
I hope the game is good, and I hope it is successful, though I have not spent a dime on it. If it is not successful, you'll need an Ark to escape the tears.
 
The amounts of money being thrown at celebrity devs via crowd funding by nostalgia obsessed man children is both hilarious and pathetic. Hey guys, we're rebooting GEX, give us money!

Just mention an old, semi-abandoned IP, toss out the phrases old-school and retro and morons will just shower you in cash. Example.
 
I've been saying exactly this since inception. Buying a promise of a game is worse than pre-ordering. Just wait until the damn game is out, see if reviews are good, and THEN give them your cash.

Good game ideas that have a market will still be made without you having to fund it sight unseen. Worse yet, people aren't spending $30 or $60 on this game, some people are literally spending THOUSANDS of dollars on a single video game. This is insane.
 
The only reason I support Star Citizen is because Chris Roberts is driving it. In most cases, this would seem like a scam, but Roberts has been invested in the genre for a very long period of time (he arguably wrote the book on space combat sims from the 90s).

They have shown some pretty solid progress despite being behind their milestones a bit. And overall, they did add a lot to the scope of the project based on the amount of money they brought in, so I cut them some slack.

I've played the dogfighting module, and the racing module and have had a blast. If they can further translate this into the open world, they will be sitting on a gold mine.

That being said, I do wish Star Citizen would make fewer cash grabs this early.
 
game is half built? it's not even released yet. still in pre-alpha.
 
This crowdfunding thing is just batshit crazy. I'm all for throwing a few $ at a cause and hope for the best but the amount these folks are spending...
 
darkstarcow said:
How long has the game been in development and how much of it is completed?
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Development began in winter 2012/2013. Ramp up to full staff took another year. Effectively, the game has been in full-bore production for about two years.

Completion percentage is hard to gauge. Assume they have 75% of the core game systems completed, perhaps rounding out to 50% complete overall. That clocks us in at 4 years development time. Ask Bethesda how much of an Elder Scrolls title they have complete in 4 years :cool:.
 
inbedwithhomer said:
People seem to think shit just materializes.
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Pretty much, my understanding is Star Citizen has set multiple milestones for this year, has multiple studios working on different aspects and should have a lot of the core stuff completed by Q1 2016. I mean they're only building the frigging universe in the game, not sure why everyone expects it to be done so quickly.

crusty_juggler said:
The amounts of money being thrown at celebrity devs via crowd funding by nostalgia obsessed man children is both hilarious and pathetic. Hey guys, we're rebooting GEX, give us money!

Just mention an old, semi-abandoned IP, toss out the phrases old-school and retro and morons will just shower you in cash. Example.
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Someone sound bitter.

Ducman69 said:
've been saying exactly this since inception. Buying a promise of a game is worse than pre-ordering. Just wait until the damn game is out, see if reviews are good, and THEN give them your cash.

Good game ideas that have a market will still be made without you having to fund it sight unseen. Worse yet, people aren't spending $30 or $60 on this game, some people are literally spending THOUSANDS of dollars on a single video game. This is insane.
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It's a gamble, but there are payoffs to it also. Some of the games I've enjoyed the most have been crowdfunded and wouldn't have made it without people funding it ahead of time. Big publishers simply won't fund a lot of games that fall outside the mainstream. That said, yeah, people who spend thousands on a game are nuts, but that's hardly something native to crowdfunding. Just look at the WoW crowd or people who blow hundreds on mobile games.
 
That could mean it won't be coming until 2018.
 
Ducman69 said:
I've been saying exactly this since inception. Buying a promise of a game is worse than pre-ordering. Just wait until the damn game is out, see if reviews are good, and THEN give them your cash.

Good game ideas that have a market will still be made without you having to fund it sight unseen. Worse yet, people aren't spending $30 or $60 on this game, some people are literally spending THOUSANDS of dollars on a single video game. This is insane.
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This.

It is the same type of crap going on in the Bitcoin ASIC mining hardware company space:
1) Company promises revolutionary, killer next-gen, vaporware miner.
2) Company immediately begins taking pre-orders for batches of the vaporware miner.
3) Company fails to deliver vaporware miner, but has taken $$$$$$$ from customers via pre-orders.
4) People grow tired of waiting....
4.5) Company gets hit with massive refunds, goes bankrupt, never delivers miner, gets sued to hell and back.

See Alpha Technologies for a recent canonical example.
 
What's weird to me is that somehow theres no investment angle in crowd funding. How'd they get away with that? Wouldn't it make more sense to actually get some shares or something in said game doe your donation?

Apparently I'm crazy tho because people gave away 77m.
 
While I think the amount is excessive , getting into silly land really , I do want to ask those screaming about never support a KS nor preorder,

How would any of us be enjoying Pillars of Eternity , one of the best games in many , many years , without funding it ?

No publisher was going to touch it , same as Wasteland 2 , etc.

I for one hope SC success simply because I am so sick and tired of AC VI , GTA XIX , etc remakes.

On the mmo front , for me , Camelot Unchained , with actual server communities and decisions that matter in character choices , is the type of mmo I want , and no "real" publisher will touch that type of thing.
 
chockomonkey said:
What's weird to me is that somehow theres no investment angle in crowd funding. How'd they get away with that? Wouldn't it make more sense to actually get some shares or something in said game doe your donation?

Apparently I'm crazy tho because people gave away 77m.
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It's basically an overcorrection to the previous market situation. People had been wanting a good space sim for years, but most publishers completely pulled out, leaving fans high and dry. So with the promise of ANY good one coming along, they got flooded with money pent up from years of publishers neglecting the genre. So yeah, guarantees would be nice, but it looks like the fans who ponied that up were too desperate / hopeful to care. This is what happens when investors completely ignore a viable part of the industry, while an alternative emerges.
 
I am personally exited for this game. I purchased one of the lower end packages since the rest can be gotten in game after the game actually launches.

Who cares if it takes a while longer for it to come out. Being a programmer I understand how huge of an undertaking this is.

I do think that the people spending large amounts of money on this are certifiably insane though.
 
One thing you constantly hear from the crowdfunding...uh, crowd is that they have full confidence in Tim Schafer/Chris Roberts etc because they made a cool game once in the 90's. Even when the writing is clearly on the wall, they refuse to accept that these projects are cash grabs.
NeoMatriX724 said:
The only reason I support Star Citizen is because Chris Roberts is driving it. In most cases, this would seem like a scam, but Roberts has been invested in the genre for a very long period of time (he arguably wrote the book on space combat sims from the 90s).
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See? I find this blind devotion to celebrity developers from 20 years ago to be bizarre.
tetris42 said:
Someone sound bitter.
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Bitter? No. Jealous? Most certainly. I wish I could have gotten a slice of these cash grabs myself.

Hmmm, maybe I can reboot Ecco the Dolphin, collect a million dollars, ship a bug-ridden alpha product and then laugh all the way to the bank. After that, a Shenmue scam me thinks.
 
Not surprised. It's a Wired article. One day they used to be credible, but nowadays, well, if it's not Apple or some hipster bike product, it's garbage.
 
If not for Chris Roberts involvement I would have no interest in Star Citizen and I doubt it would have earned even a small sliver of what it has. That being said, to create everything they've promised to build into this game is going to take a decade, if they can even hope to do it at all. I like what they've done so far and I am hopeful for the future of the game but it's not going to come quickly and anyone who thinks the game is going launch feature complete anywhere near it's 2016 window is smoking something. They seem to have recognized that as well since they basically renamed the Arena Commander to "Star Citizen 1.0"
 
chockomonkey said:
What's weird to me is that somehow theres no investment angle in crowd funding. How'd they get away with that? Wouldn't it make more sense to actually get some shares or something in said game doe your donation?

Apparently I'm crazy tho because people gave away 77m.
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they can't do anything investment related. there are just all types of rules required to get listed and it also puts them under the scrutiny of regulators and opens them up to lawsuits.
 
Seems like someone doesn't understand that game development takes time, especially a big one. There was what, a 5 year gap between GTA4 and GTA5? Vanilla WoW was also a 5 year dev cycle and being an MMO makes it far more analogous to SC (and lets face it, CIG has gotten large over the years but it's not Blizzard). Chris started pre-production work on SC in late 2011 mainly by himself and calling in the occasional favor, full production didn't really start until after the initial crowd funding finished and he was able to stand up a proper studio.
 
I stopped investing (buying stuff) in SC a while ago when I started reading their plans on how big they planned on making this game. I thought to myself that there is no way that can make everything that they're promising and have it be a good game.
 
As someone who has been following it for a very long time I have to laugh at people who couldn't take an hour to read up on it before giving their "expert opinion"

Anyway, simply put I'd rather have the game done correctly than half assed. CIG is planning to deliver Squadron 42 at the end of this year, so it should be a good indicator of where tey are at. Rather than a limited buggy pre alpha build that someone wants to complain about being buggy and unfinished lol...
 
There is nothing wrong with crowdfunding a game as long as you make the assumption that whatever money you throw at it is lost forever. You will not get it back if the game fails to materialize.

With that said, it says a lot about the inability of publishers to recognize what people really want. That people have to spend their money on someone's dream on the hope that they can get enjoyment if it is finished.

Most of these games would have never made it past the salesman pitch meeting. But fans are clamoring for them. Meanwhile the UBISOFTs of the world blame piracy on sinking sales because the public didn't buy the 20th sequel of a game they released years ago. They honestly don't know that people are truly sick of the same game over and over.

So thus we have crowdfunding where you can back the game of your dreams for as little as $5. Do people get ripped off? Yes. Do we get some of the best games ever released from crowdfunding? Yes. In my opinion it's fine to crowd fund a project as long as you can stomach getting cheated by some unsavory developers. If that doesn't scare you then go for it!
 
Let that be a lesson to all the 200 fools who bought a $2,500 Javelin Destroyer, and the bigger fools who bought the $10k Wing Commander package.

For digital goods not even yet complete??

*big eye roll*
 
Smoeki said:
As someone who has been following it for a very long time I have to laugh at people who couldn't take an hour to read up on it before giving their "expert opinion"

Anyway, simply put I'd rather have the game done correctly than half assed. CIG is planning to deliver Squadron 42 at the end of this year, so it should be a good indicator of where tey are at. Rather than a limited buggy pre alpha build that someone wants to complain about being buggy and unfinished lol...
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Alright just come clean and tell us how much you have in it. :-P
 
I bought into this game, but not a penny more than just the game tier. I always question this game and the people that continually buy these "ships" and have pushed the funding to $77M. Now I understand it's their money and they can do what they want, but I think all the people that continually pledge are doing this game a disservice.

The game's original funding goal was $2M, they exceeded that and I expected a finished product by their estimated delivery date of Nov 2014. That was an estimated 2 year development cycle. It's past that now and all we got is a multiplayer alpha. I understand very well that development takes time, and it's only March 2015, but for a kickstarter game to have had an original release date of 2014 to not even be in beta. We should have at least a relatively feature complete alpha in testing by now but it doesn't seem they are that far in. Now if he only had what he made in the kickstarter super stretch goal of $6M, I would have probably not been concerned too much, but at this point with the CONSTANT, putting up virtual ships for sale, this "game" has become some kind of self funding insanity that I don't think Chris Roberts wants to finish anymore because people just keep literally giving him money for nothing.

I don't want to hear anymore from CIG about more virtual stuff he has for sale. I just want to hear stuff like I did for the Pillars of Eternity Kickstarter that I also supported and is now released, about actual progress of the game I bought. I want this guy to actually FEATURE FREEZE this game so he can you know FINISH it in my lifetime. Seriously I backed a Wing Commander like game not a FPS!!! How much extra development time is adding that FPS going to tack on? Stop with the feature creeping and feature freeze the game and finish it off already. You got tons of money now, put the ideas you have in a folder for Star Citizen 2 and get on with finishing Star Citizen!

Case and point here is a quote of the first thing listed from my weekly email:
Relentless Predator: The Aegis Vanguard

Mar 27, 2015 04:52 pm

Discover the latest long-range fighter from Aegis!
Test Drive the Aegis Gladius!

Mar 27, 2015 11:41 am

For the next Week the Gladius is free to try!
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Seriously WTF!
 
MikeRotch said:
I stopped investing (buying stuff) in SC a while ago when I started reading their plans on how big they planned on making this game. I thought to myself that there is no way that can make everything that they're promising and have it be a good game.
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This right here (although I personally haven't bought into this game at all).

Also, I'm just not interested in the not-flying-a-space-ship parts of the game. I don't want to play an MMO. I don't want to grind for "credits." I don't want to be a space privateer.

I just want another goddamn Wing Commander. I'm probably in the minority, but of all the Wing Commander games, I thought Privateer was the weakest of the series, and I'll be damned if I'll pay extra to suffer through that experience while also getting ganked by asshats from the internet.
 
RazorWind said:
This right here (although I personally haven't bought into this game at all).

Also, I'm just not interested in the not-flying-a-space-ship parts of the game. I don't want to play an MMO. I don't want to grind for "credits." I don't want to be a space privateer.

I just want another goddamn Wing Commander. I'm probably in the minority, but of all the Wing Commander games, I thought Privateer was the weakest of the series, and I'll be damned if I'll pay extra to suffer through that experience while also getting ganked by asshats from the internet.
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I agree with you on Privateer. It was the weakest in the series, but in execution alone. The idea of that game appeals to me more than any other WC game to date.
 
RazorWind said:
This right here (although I personally haven't bought into this game at all).

Also, I'm just not interested in the not-flying-a-space-ship parts of the game. I don't want to play an MMO. I don't want to grind for "credits." I don't want to be a space privateer.

I just want another goddamn Wing Commander. I'm probably in the minority, but of all the Wing Commander games, I thought Privateer was the weakest of the series, and I'll be damned if I'll pay extra to suffer through that experience while also getting ganked by asshats from the internet.
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Privateer was just way, way, way too hard to earn credits in. The same for Privateer 2. Save game editors to give yourself credits makes both of those games fun. If you have enough money so that you can buy whatever you want and then actually play the storyline makes a world of difference.

Have you tried the X series of space flight games?
 
I'm so tired of reading people complaining about crowdfunding video games. Without Kickstarter I wouldn't be playing a lot of the games I've enjoyed recently - Pillars of Eternity, Wasteland 2, Divinity: Original Sin, etc.

If the $20-30 it costs to back a video game is that big of a deal to you personally then don't donate to or back these games. Pretty simple.
 
Rizen said:
I'm so tired of reading people complaining about crowdfunding video games. Without Kickstarter I wouldn't be playing a lot of the games I've enjoyed recently - Pillars of Eternity, Wasteland 2, Divinity: Original Sin, etc.

If the $20-30 it costs to back a video game is that big of a deal to you personally then don't donate to or back these games. Pretty simple.
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Nonsense, that's like saying that if people stopped pre-ordering games, that all their favorite games that are available for pre-order wouldn't have been made.

They would have simply obtained capital the same way every business has since the middle-ages.
 
Hell I spend a couple a hundred twice a month taking the wife to dinner and whatever her choice of entertainment for the evening, so yeah I bought a MISC Freelancer DUR and a Anvil F7C Hornet. will probably buy an Avenger to. I don't give a Rats A$$ about what the nasayers think I'm in and can't wait for this game to drop.
 
Ducman69 said:
Nonsense, that's like saying that if people stopped pre-ordering games, that all their favorite games that are available for pre-order wouldn't have been made.

They would have simply obtained capital the same way every business has since the middle-ages.
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Okay, maybe in a few cases, but no developers were giving a shit about medium to big budget turn based isometric RPGs for a decade or two. They simply wouldn't have gotten funded past the 1990s. I mean did I just miss the explosion of publisher-funded turn-based RPGs, space sims, and horror games from the past decade prior to kickstarter? With very few exceptions, these games just weren't getting funded. Now we're having a renaissance of them thanks to things like kickstarter, early access games, etc.

Also you're talking about bigger names. What about games like FTL, Project Zomboid, Kentucky Route Zero, Xenonauts? Some of those devs were living hand to mouth, on some of those crowdfunding is the only way they even exist.
 
Ok, at this point in time I have to come to the screaming defense of Cloud Imperium.

In the future my opinion could change, but I do follow the development of the game both weekly and monthly. They REALLY ARE building a gigantic game. They are very open about what they are working on. There has been plenty of proof of things like their gigantic and well equipped mocap studio, their team of persistent universe coders, the company doing the AI work and images of their workstations showing their progress and tools.

It's not like we have ONLY their word to go on. Their monthly dev reports and insider videos of their various teams working pretty much show a fully functional game development company.

It's absolutely nothing like most other crowdfunded games where you only get a dev blog and some promises that could be pure bull.

A great example would be DayZ. It's fun, and we all like to play it, but what do their dev studios really look like? How many are working, what are they working on and are they really putting in the hours? It's hard to tell. With Star Citizen, it is very easy to see the work getting done.

So no. It's not vaporware. It's a buggy half-built game because they are not even halfway there yet. Building something the size and scope of WoWs economy and backend gameplay systems and marrying it to real-time sim and fps combat is just as difficult as it sounds. It hasn't been done before. So as long as they continue to openly show what's going on during the work day, we don't have anything to complain about.

Also, the FPS module should go live within a month. That's big. The first persistent universe features should go in toward the end of the year. That's gigantic.

Now as to the SANITY of anyone who has donated $1000+ to this game? That is not the same issue at all and not relevant to whether they are working on the game. I've got about $75 tied up. I'm more than happy with that risk. I may put in a few more dollars before it's done.
 
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